Sixty-six-year-old Anarul Khan lives in a small village of Lauriya in one of Bihar’s most backward districts. The family lives in constant poverty in lack of any active income. One of the major sources of their income is pension that the elderly couple gets from the government. But the family living Below the Poverty Line…
Access to reliable support provides an extra lease of life to those who may be isolated or live on the fringes. Elderly, especially in rural India, hardly have any access to information due to lack of digital literacy making them prone to vulnerabilities. In his 60s, Uttarakhand’s Dhan Lal Pita could not even avail his…
A graduate from Warangal’s Kakatiya University, Damera Raju dreamt big. He put in hard work and efforts to crack competitive examinations with limited resources he had. “It was difficult to find access to competitive exams material but with support from DEF-IPLM programme, I was able to study hard,” he says. He appeared for various job…
DEF’s rural entrepreneurship-based smart village model Smartpur is growing with its extensive partnerships on ground across 100 locations in India. The project aims at bringing efficiency in daily lives under its six pillars—education, health, governance, finance, livelihood and edutainment. Under the health pillar, on April 3, a medical camp was held at Dharmarayudupeta, one of…
An Internet Saathi, Anuradha Gautam from Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa has made it a mission to empower women in her village. “I could not continue my studies immediately after I was married off in the first year of my graduation,” she says, adding she had to take a gap of a year before she was able…
“We had no idea that honey-ginger could be harmful for our children in any way possible,” says Savita, a resident from UP’s Ghazipur who, along with several other women from her locality, is learning a healthy lifestyle with the help of POSHAN Preraks. “There was no open conversation on the issue; people certainly knew that…
Aurat Raaj is a feminist platform in Pakistan that inspires and educates girls and women through innovative digital content in an effort to deliver progressive ideas about women empowerment. Through blogs, videos, workshops, mobile screenings, chatbots and an animated character called Raaji, it addresses issues of self-defence, body confidence, consent, reporting abuse, seeking help for…
Preethi Herman Global Executive Director Change.org Foundation In October 2015, Masooma Ranalvi wrote a blog about her experience of undergoing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Her blog described the horrific experience of being circumcised as a little girl without consent or preparation. What she didn’t know then was that she had just initiated the crowdsourced movement…
Women living in remote Indian villages often live a life marred with hardships. Left alone after spouses, other family members move to cities in search of better work opportunities, they have to take care of their children all by themselves like Uttarakhand’s Guddi Devi. Despite government schemes for rural employment, the villagers who rarely know…
POSHAN Abhiyaan is the Government’s flagship programme to improve nutritional standards among pregnant women, lactating mothers, infants, children and adolescents. In an effort to amplify the scheme’s reach in rural India through digitisation, UNICEF and DEF have collaborated to organise community dialogues in 10 states which has four phases to it. In the ongoing implementation phase, POSHAN Preraks…